Belisa

The girl Belisa is beautiful, amorous and sensual. “White underneath. Like sugar”; so sings the enchanted Don Perlimplin about his young bride. But already on her wedding night Belisa takes five lovers in front of the sleeping bridegroom, and the opera develops from stylized opera buffa into a mystical, ambivalent drama with an enigmatic ending. Poul Rovsing Olsen's opera based on the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa is a chamber play about eroticism, love and death; at once tragic and grotesque.

Poul Rovsing Olsen underscores the surrealistic aspect of Lorca's drama with dreamlike music. Belisa's wonderful songs cast an exotic lustre over the fundamentally lyrical tone of the opera. Belisa fuses elements of the Arab musical tradition with European modernism in a through-composed totality. A musical encounter between different cultures is elevated into a unique operatic work that has won a special status in recent Danish music.

Poul Rovsing Olsen (1922-1982) was born into music. His father played cello and piano, his mother sang, and there were often private music soirees in his home. At an early age he was given ear training and piano lessons, and his obvious musical talent was ensured smooth development.

Poul Rovsing Olsen studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, graduating in music theory and piano in 1946. Two years later he took a new degree in law at the University of Copenhagen. Thus equipped for the world, he went off to Paris, where he continued his musical studies with the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger and the composer Olivier Messiaen.

After his return in 1949, Rovsing Olsen unfolded the whole range of his talents. As a lawyer he worked until 1960 at the Ministry of Education, where he helped to draft the Danish Copyright Act. He worked as a musical writer on the newspapers Information and Berlingske Tidende, and he composed.

An interest in Oriental music aroused at an early age was greatly strengthened in 1958 when he joined the legendary excavations in the Arabian Gulf led by the Danish archaeologist professor P.V. Glob. Over the next few years, Rovsing Olsen returned to the Gulf States several times, and went on music-collecting expeditions to places as diverse as India, Egypt, Turkey and Greenland. The ethnomusicological expertise he thus acquired brought him wide recognition in specialist circles and led to a position as Keeper of the Danish Folklore Archives, where he was able to concentrate on the ethnomusicological work, and to the post as Chairman of the International Council for Traditional Music. Two results of his exploration of the musical culture of the Gulf States were the record Pêcheurs de Perles et Musiciens du Golfe Persique (Disques Ocora, OCR 42, 1969) and the book with three accompanying CDs Music in Bahrain. Traditional Music of the Arabian Gulf (Moesgaard Museum, Denmark and the Ministry of Information, Bahrain, 2002).

To his artistic credit Poul Rovsing Olsen has 85 compositions, including orchestral works, the ballets Ragnarok, La Création, The Wedding and The Outsider, the operas Belisa and Usher, songs, piano compositions and chamber music.

The research on the musical cultures of faraway countries left its mark on Rovsing Olsen's own compositions. He aimed at clarity and substance, and by fusing elements from the Occidental and Oriental traditions he developed a personal musical idiom that was unusual in Danish music. Poul Rovsing Olsen himself said that it was his dream "to make music as direct as possible, to bring it closer to the listener".

Belisa between Orient and Occident

Belisa, Poul Rovsing Olsen's first opera, was composed at the request of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. As a libretto he used the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca's (1898-1936) play Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su jardin in a Danish rendering by Paul la Cour with the title Don Perlimplins kærlig-hed til Belisa.

The world premiere of the opera took place at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen on 3rd September, 1966 and aroused great attention in the press, with coverage in Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway. The reception was mainly positive. In the newspaper Jyllands-Posten one could read that it is a work "in which one senses the breath of inspiration and a genuine poetic pulse". Berlingske Tidende wrote that it is in "the mainly static evocations of moods, in the lyrical passages, that this score has its strongest sides - this in combination with a musical characterization of the roles that is carried through with great consistency". The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter praised the composer's mastery of the expressive resources of modern music, which he "used with care and judgement". In 1970 Belisa was broadcast as a radio opera with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the newspapers noted: "Rov-sing Olsen has dressed Lorca's bitter drama in graceful and profoundly serious musical clothing" (Berlingske Tidende), and "one listened deeply enthralled to this music" (Land og Folk).

Rovsing Olsen's opera is a chamber play about eros, love and death, at once tragic and grotesque.

The plot is a variation on the familiar theme of the prosperous older man (Don Perlimplin) who takes a beautiful young wife (Belisa) and is deceived. Even on her wedding night the beautiful bride receives five lovers. But there is one more man in whom she is intensely interested. Belisa does not know who he is, and she has never seen his face, but he sends her love letters, and she imagines that "his kiss must be sweet and searing at the same time". Belisa goes out expectantly to a nocturnal rendezvous with him in her garden, where he is to come in the red cloak in which he is also wrapped when he walks past her house. That it is her husband Perlimplin who, hidden behind the cloak, acts the role of her unknown suitor, is something she only learns when he dies in a bloody scene in the garden at the end of the opera.

In an interview in connection with the world premiere, Rovsing Olsen said of his choice of libretto that he was captivated by the actual love theme between man and woman as well as the fact "that from Lorca's both old-fashioned and eternal story no moral or conclusion whatsoever can be drawn. Thus the story is elevated into the realm of the mystical, is torn from the world of reality and at times becomes quite surrealistic".

The girl Belisa is beautiful, passionate and compellingly sensual. "Like sugar, white on the inside!" says Perlimplin in the opera.

Don Perlimplin is a cultivated gentleman, who has enough in his books.

"He was born a pedant. No wonder there is often something theatrical about his musical manifestation - this is already evident from scene three's fast-moving duet with Belisa. But love turns him into a living human being", writes the composer in a "Note on Belisa" in Dansk Musik Tidsskrift (no. 3, 1968).

According to Rovsing Olsen, Belisa too is different at the end of the opera from at the beginning: "Her sensualism has taken on a new shade, has become more open and at the same time more restless".

The opera starts as a puppet comedy. But, the composer writes in the same article, "the puppets come to life, and in their life together they create a strange tragedy. Humour and fantasy are after all close. Humour can be gesturally inspired, as in the mother's celesta-accompanied canzone or as in Perlimplin's bashful overtures in the wedding-night scene with its pregnant pauses. It can also play with the ironic musical yoking-together of heterogeneous ingredients, as happens in the duettino of the 'house spirits': this, the opera's most clearly marked tonal passage, is based on an ornamented twelve-tone melody."

The composer sums up the stylistic issues of the opera as follows: "In Belisa there are as many stylistically divergent forms of expression as there are differently-minded characters. But these forms of expression are related to one another in constantly new patterns. I can mention just one of the motifs, which is actually, strictly speaking, not a motif. For the gossipy narrative of the house spirits about Belisa's lovers is a twelve-tone row. This twelve-tone row seems to pop up quite a few times in Perlimplin's and Marcolfa's memory, and in some odd way is associated with Belisa's unfaithfulness."

Rovsing Olsen likes to speak of the title character Belisa as the Mediterranean woman. "In her, Orient and Occident meet", he says, and in his score he creates a musical counterpart of this meeting.

The surrealistic aspect of the plot by which the composer was so captivated is underscored by dream-like music where Belisa's strange songs shed an exotic light on the fundamentally lyrical sound of the opera. This alien tone is Arab-inspired and has its source in the music that Rovsing Olsen personally explored and collected during his ethnomusicological work in the Gulf States, where he seems to have felt almost at home. In Belisa, elements from the Arab musical tradition and European modernism join hands in a through-composed totality. Since his youngest years, such a synthesis had been a guiding star in Rovsing Olsen's quest for a personal style. This style is unmistakably manifested in Belisa, where the modern musical language is coloured by distinctive tonalities that introduce Oriental shades into the Danish idiom. Here a musical encounter between different cultures is subsumed into an operatic work that has come to enjoy a special status in recent Danish music.

Synopsis

Scene 1

A drawing-room in Don Perlimplin's house. The servant-girl Marcolfa urges her master, the oldish Don Perlimplin, to get married. From the house next door we hear the lovely young Belisa singing an erotic song. Don Perlimplin likes her song, and Marcolfa hastens to appoint her Perlimplin's wife-to-be. He yields to Marcolfa's arguments. From his balcony he cautiously calls out to Belisa, and when she appears he proposes to her rather helplessly. Belisa calls her mother, who unhesitatingly agrees to the marriage. Don Perlimplin is a good match. He is rich and "money creates beauty", she explains to her daughter. The arrangement is settled and Don Perlimplin is left with unquiet thoughts. Again we hear Belisa sing her song.

Scene 2

A bedroom in the house of Don Perlimplin. It is the wedding night. Belisa undresses in an adjacent room. Perlimplin looks through the keyhole at her and is overwhelmed by emotions. She goes into the bedroom and while she waits for her husband she hears five whistles outside. "Five of them", she says to herself. Perlimplin comes to her and in a tender conversation confesses his love for her. The light in the room is extinguished. Now two household spirits slink on to the stage and pull a veiling curtain across it. The household spirits chat with each other about the veiling and unveiling of people's secrets, and about the gossip that makes the world go round. And they make joking hints about the five balconies of the room. The five whistles are heard again. The household spirits pull the curtain aside and sneak out. In the bridal bed we see Perlimplin with a pair of horns on his forehead. Belisa lies by his side. It is morning. The five balcony doors stand open. Perlimplin asks Belisa why they are open, why there are five ladders up to the balconies, whose are the five hats lying under the balconies, and who has been kissing her. She whispers kittenishly that he was the one who was kissing her, and she goes off to sleep again. Perlimplin sits on the edge of the bed. Deceived and wounded by his wife, he sings a tormented love song.

Scene 3

Don Perlimplin's dining room. While he is finishing his meal he talks to Marcolfa, who confirms Belisa's nocturnal activities. Yes, she received five men. They were the European, the Indian, the Negro, the Yellow Man and the North American. They came in through the balcony doors. "And you did not even notice", says Marcolfa reproachfully to her master. But there is yet another man circling around Belisa. She comes into the room and talks to herself passionately about this man. She does not know him, but he sends her love letters and makes her breasts tremble when, wrapped in his red cloak, he passes her balconies and slowly waves his hand. Perlimplin, who has stayed concealed, approaches her, but she seems inaccessible. A letter wrapped around a stone is suddenly thrown in through the balcony door. Perlimplin picks it up but he gives it when asked to Belisa, who hides the letter at her breast. To this Perlimplin says that he knows everything and understands everything, and that he forgives her for everything. He even hints that he may know the stranger with whom Belisa is so obsessed, but whose face she has never seen, and that he, Perlimplin, will sacrifice himself for her happiness.

Scene 4

Don Perlimplin is in his garden with Marcolfa. At his request she has given Belisa a message saying that she can meet her new lover in the garden at the stroke of ten that evening, and as usual he will wear his red cloak. We hear men's voices singing a sensitive song in chorus. Belisa comes into the garden. She sees the branches move, and a man in a red cloak steps out. He makes a sign to Belisa and disappears again. Perlimplin appears and asks her if she still hopes that the stranger will come. She answers that she is sure that he will, and this is because she loves him boundlessly. Perlimplin declares that he will stab this unknown admirer, and runs out. Belisa is in despair. But now the man in the red cloak comes staggering towards her. Belisa takes him in her arms and asks him to reveal his face so that she can see it at last. He throws the cloak aside and points to the dagger which has been stabbed into his chest. Belisa sees with horror that the admirer in the red cloak is her husband Don Perlimplin. He has stabbed himself. She will never see the other man's face. For it was Perlimplin who walked in his red cloak beneath the balcony and waved his hand; and it was he who had written love letters to her. Perlimplin has pretended to be Belisa's admirer and has died for his love.